In defense of blue blood.

New Englanders are inclined to differentiate between good and bad by determining whether it’s old or new. Frugality, reluctance to change, reliance on the “tried and true”, abhorrence of things showy or gaudy, pride in the past, a strong need for tradition and continuity – all these natural inclinations in our personalities result, not surprisingly, in our wearing slightly threadbare old clothes, joining old, comfortable not-posh social clubs, owning old boats, attending old schools and colleges, living in old houses, marrying into old families, and so forth.

Judson Hale, Inside New England (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 141.

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April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

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Where you gather on Thanksgiving Eve is just as important as what’s on the menu on Turkey Day itself.

Dorrian’s.

IF Thanksgiving is about turkey,the day before is about toasting. “It’s known as reunion night,” says New Yorker James Tang, a banker and frequent patron of Dorrian’s Red Hand, on the Upper East Side. “Dorrian’s is the perfect meeting place because New Yorkers, especially Upper East Siders, hung out there during college. They go by Dorrian’s because they know they’ll see everyone they’ve ever met,” adds Tang, who also bartends there for fun. “It’s the natives’ night out.” That’s the general consensus among establishments. “It’s always a busy bar night, because people are home visiting friends and family,” says Bill Timpson, co-owner of Buckram Stables Café in Locust Valley, New York. “There are a lot of people who went to high school here, and now they’re coming back in their forties or fifties.” A crowd is to be expected. “We put an extra bartender on; we ramp up.”

Fifth-generation New Yorker Michael R. McCarty has brought this tradition to Palm Beach, where he owns McCarty’s, a restaurant that draws the likes of Marjorie Gubelmann, Topper Mortimer, Samantha Boardman, and Bobby Leidy, the grandson of Lilly Pulitzer. “We actually don’t even open on Thanksgiving,” McCarty says, but on Wednesday, one of the restaurant’s biggest nights of the year, the terrace is as busy as it gets. “They all show up, and it’s a crazy, crazy weekend all the way through.”

from Town & Country magazine.

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IN THE 1960s, when the Hancock people wrote to the longtime Casino president, Doris (Mrs. John) Winterbotham, asking to buy the club property so they could have not one but two high-rises in their project, she tossed the letter into a desk drawer, where it was found after her death years later. She had never replied, and the developer decided to leave well enough alone.1